The author is a Forbes contributor. The opinions expressed are those of the writer.

Loading ...

Loading ...

This story appears in the {{article.article.magazine.pretty_date}} issue of {{article.article.magazine.pubName}}. Subscribe

Dear Admiral Romney,

I was very surprised that during last night's foreign policy debate, you again compared the size of America's armed forces to what they were last century. By now, I thought you would have dropped silly comparisons such as the U.S. Navy today becoming smaller than in 1916. As President Obama rightly pointed out, our current Navy has a few minor weapons that weren't available in 1916, such as aircraft carriers and submarines armed with nuclear weapons.Your statement that the Air Force will shrink to the size of 1947 was also peculiar, given that a World War II B-17 bomber carried two tons of dumb bombs that would be lucky to land within a quarter-mile of a target, while today's B-2 bomber can drop a 15-ton smart bomb down the mouth of a mountainside tunnel. Given the Republican party's interest in women's reproductive rights, I'm sure you will agree that size isn't everything.

To be fair, President Obama was not totally correct in suggesting that horses and bayonets are relics of the past; U.S. commandos did ride horses when they helped topple the Taliban regime, and the Marine Corps still teaches bayonet training. Yet because you might yet be elected President and Commander-in-Chief, I thought it would be helpful to go over a few changes since 1916:

* Jet aircraft. A Sopwith Camel flew at 115 miles per hour. An F-22 flies at 1,500 miles per hour. Perhaps you could pay for tax cuts by replacing our F-22s with Sopwith Camels?

* Tanks: Britain and France built thousands of tanks in World War One (the Americans had to borrow its tanks from them). But comparing a World War One tank to a modern M-1 Abrams is like sending a Matchbox to fight a monster truck.

* Smart bombs. British artillery pounded the German defenses at the Somme in 1916 for a week, and the British still lost 20,000 dead on the first day of the offensive. A much smaller number of smart bombs crippled Saddam Hussein's army in the First Gulf War. It's not how many bombs you have. It's where the bombs land that count.

* Helicopters. By 1918, the U.S. Army was 3.5 million-strong. But it marched into battle on foot. Today's U.S. Army will probably shrink to about 500,000, but soldiers go into battle aboard Blackhawk helicopters cruising at 170 miles per hour. We may not have as many soldiers now, but helicopters and transport aircraft allow them to get to where they needed faster.

* Nuclear weapons. What can I say? If the Kaiser had developed nukes, we would either be speaking German or be three-headed mutants scavenging among the ruins. Nuclear weapons mean that no matter how small our military is, if we really lose a big war, so does everyone else.

Size is important (or as Stalin said, "quantity has a quality all its own"). In a counterinsurgency campaign like Afghanistan, you need a certain number of boots on the ground, no matter how high-tech they are. But Obama is right that we should be focusing on capability rather than size, especially given that our next conflict might be with a relatively high-tech power China. In an era when an aircraft carrier costs $12 billion and a single fighter jet $150 million, size can only be so big.